How to be Better Organized for Studying | PaperHelp Reviews

Both at work and when studying, the organization is vital to achieving the goals you have set for yourself. Therefore, starting today, you should take it very seriously to improve the organization of your study time.

Why is it essential to organize your study time well?

Most people have severe difficulties in organizing their study time. What are the consequences of this lack of organization? It usually causes a lack of time to study, not taking advantage of the time you dedicate to research, and not progressing at the pace you would like to. Undoubtedly, these feelings generate frustration and, in many cases, lead to the abandonment of studies. But, before throwing in the towel, read this article because we will give you some tips to improve the organization of your time to study.

First of all, let’s see what it means to get organized. We could say that organizing means ordering and planning the means and actions we need to achieve the goal we have set ourselves. Therefore, if we set ourselves the goal of passing the next exam, we should order and plan everything we will need to achieve it. To do this, you will have to ask yourself the following questions: How much time do I have until the exam? What do I have to study? Is there any more difficult part? How much free time do I have to dedicate to study? What daily objectives do I have to set myself to arrive prepared for the exam?

Let’s take a look at some tips that will help you to organize your study time better and will allow you to optimize your time and improve your results:

Set yourself monthly, weekly and daily goals.

Divide your main objective into small goals. That way, as you meet these goals, you will stay more motivated, and it will be easier for you to know if you are meeting the plan.

For example, suppose your main goal is to pass the entrance exam to a university or higher education or pass a competitive examination. In that case, you should know how many subjects you have in each issue, and that way, from the time you have until the test, you can calculate how many matters you have to study per month to be on time and prepared for the test. Once you know how many topics you have to learn per month, it is easy to set weekly and daily goals to achieve them.

Create a study schedule.

Analyze your situation and determine what times of the day you can dedicate to study. To do this, it can be beneficial to use a calendar (you can use Google Calendar) and mark the hours of the day that you have already occupied by work or other obligations of your day to day (picking up children from school, gym, etc.). Once you have marked all the hours you have occupied, you can visualize the free slots to study.

Now you can create your study calendar and determine the hours you will dedicate to study each day of the week.

Determine how much time you will devote to each subject per week.

Not all subjects require the same amount of study time. Some topics are more accessible for you, and others are more complicated. In addition, the difficulty of issues often varies from person to person.

It would help if you classified subjects according to their difficulty: low, medium, or high. Based on this classification, you should assign more study time per week to the more difficult subjects and less time to those that are easier.

How much time do I have to dedicate to each subject? It will depend on the monthly, weekly, and daily objectives you have previously set and your free time each week.

Imagine that you have 20 hours a week available to study and you have to prepare 5 subjects, 2 of which are of great difficulty, 2 of which are of medium difficulty and one of which is of joint problem. You can dedicate 5 hours to the complex subjects, 3 and a half hours to the topics with medium difficulty, and 3 hours to the most accessible topic.

Plan today what you have to do tomorrow (study schedule).

Do not improvise and avoid having to decide at every moment what you have to do next. The secret to having a productive day is to have organized it in advance.

It would help if you considered the following when planning tomorrow:

• You can use an App, a calendar, a notepad, or whatever you want, but you must capture tomorrow’s planning (study schedule) somewhere in writing. Never rely on your ability to remember something from today to tomorrow. I tell you from experience. It doesn’t work.
• Don’t plan large, complex tasks. Break them down into smaller, more manageable tasks. For example, don’t plan for tomorrow that from 10:00 to 12:00 you will study mathematics, but you should specify that in those two hours you are going to do the exercises of the systems of equations unit.
• You must prioritize and block out time to complete your assignments. Determine the most important tasks for tomorrow and set aside enough time to do them (Timeblocking).

First, the more complex subjects or tasks and then the simpler ones.

Just like your muscles, when we subject our brain to intense and continuous work, it becomes fatigued and finds it increasingly challenging to perform difficult and complex tasks. For this reason, it is always advisable to plan the tasks that require the most mental effort first thing in the morning and the most straightforward and most automated tasks later in the afternoon.

In this case, as it is possible that your study schedules do not coincide with the early hours of the day, I recommend that you plan the more complex tasks or subjects at the beginning of your study sessions and the more straightforward tasks or issues later.

You are not a multitasker. Focus on a single goal.

Do you think you can do more than one thing at a time? Do you feel that when you are multitasking, you are more productive? We can all do more than one task at a time, as long as only one of them requires our attention and concentration. For example, I can be doing the dishes and having a conversation. Still, we cannot do two tasks that require concentration simultaneously — for example, writing and having a conversation with another person at the same time.

Therefore, you should avoid multitasking, as your mental capacity will become saturated, and your performance can quickly drop to 60% of your ability.

When you focus on just one thing, your productivity and performance will skyrocket.